The Czech writer Milan Kundera in his collection of critical essays The Art of the Novel (1988) offers a definition of the novel as “a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters,” while providing “my personal conception of the European novel.” In Kundera’s analysis, European novelists, beginning with Cervantes, “discovered the various dimensions of existence”: in the nature of adventure (Cervantes), “what happens inside” (Richardson), man’s rootedness in history (Balzac), the terra previously incognita of the everyday (Flaubert), the impact of the irrational on human behavior (Tolstoy), the force of the present and past (Joyce and Proust, respectively), and the role of ancient myth plays in shaping present action (Mann). Analysis of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
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